


I Know Your Face (I see you)

by tisfan



Series: Imagine Tony and Bucky 2018 [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Blood and Gore, Canonical Character Death, Child Abuse, M/M, Soulmates, Torture, Underage Drinking, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 05:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14664465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Bucky has been a vampire for thousands of years. In every lifetime, Tony Stark, his mortal soulmate, is murdered by his own father.Bucky decides to get a jump on things.It does not go according to plan.





	I Know Your Face (I see you)

I Know Your Face (I See You)

 

“I know your face,” she said, and she was dying in his arms. “I see you.”

“I see you, too, Maria,” he said, and that was true, because he knew who she was, he’d always known who she was, back through all the generations, through all the reincarnations. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you weren’t supposed to be here. Let me help you.”

“No,” she said, and she put her hand over his. “Don’t.” She looked across the wreck of the car at her dead husband, and there was grief there, and a certain regret, and a certain foolish fondness. “Let me go with him. You need…” she coughed and a mouthful of blood, wet and warm, and utterly unappetizing, spilled down her chin “... you need to help Antonio. Howard hurt him, before we left, and, you need to help him. Don’t waste time with me, I’m an old woman, and you’ve--”

“You weren’t supposed to be here, you weren’t supposed to die,” Bucky said. He would have wept if he’d been able to, but that was an easement he no longer possessed, that he’d given up centuries ago.

“Fate brings us together, and tears us apart,” Maria said. Her heart beat, slower now, so slow. “Go to him, now. While you still have time.”

“See you in the next cycle,” Bucky said. He leaned down and kissed her forehead and she closed her eyes. Maria Stark breathed her last in his arms. Bucky wiped the print of his mouth off her forehead with his sleeve. He didn’t show up in any of the national databases of thieves and murderers, even though he was both, but there was no point in giving them someone to look for. Right now, everything still looked like an accident.

Like it was supposed to.

Howard was dead already, his neck broken. He’d died instantly, just like he was supposed to, the bastard.

It was less than two weeks before Christmas.

Tony Stark was seventeen years old, home from college.

Hurt. Maria had said.

Bucky was careful, he covered his tracks. He hadn’t been doing this for centuries to get caught _now_.

Not that any coroner or forensics agent would believe it.

Vampires, after all, didn’t exist.

They didn’t leave fingerprints.

They certainly didn’t leave corpses full of blood, unexsanguinated, behind.

Bucky was a vampire.

He fled into the darkness, leaving the Starks behind, the slowly cooling engine ticking softly. The slowly cooling bodies doing nothing.

***

Tony was laying in a dark corner in the far hallway of Stark mansion. He was bruised and battered, his face swollen grotesquely. He reeked of blood and alcohol.

“Oh, shit, honey, no,” Bucky said, and he fell to his knees near Tony’s still form. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Maria wasn’t supposed to be with her husband that night. Tony wasn’t supposed to be hurt. Bucky was supposed to have stopped it, this time.

Howard had been summoned to SHIELD, it was a business mission, he wasn’t supposed to take his wife. He was supposed to have been in too much of a hurry to abuse his only child.

“What happened,” Bucky wondered, too in shock for anything else. “How did it all go wrong?” He touched Tony, gently, trying to roll him over to get a gauge of his injuries.

“I was drinking, Jarvis,” Tony said. His eyes were black, puffy. He looked like a back alley boxer on a very, very bad night. “Dinnna wanna be here ‘tall.” His voice was mushy, he was missing a few teeth and Bucky was pretty sure his jaw was broken.

“Okay, honey, I got you now, I promise, everything’s gonna be okay,” Bucky said. He slid one arm under Tony’s shoulders, the other under his knees. “I’m gonna put you to bed, and then call--”

“Donnnnn call anyone, Jay,” Tony said. He was obviously pretty far gone. The Stark’s butler, Edwin Jarvis, had passed on a few years before, from pancreatic cancer. Tony still visited the grave regularly, brought flowers and everything. “Moms with ‘im. Don’t want him to hurt her.”

Bucky might have stolen a few of those flowers, kept them pressed between the pages of certain books in his library.

“Oh, honey,” Bucky said, wincing. He lifted and Tony screamed in pain, clutching at his side. His heart went jagged, blood gushing. Tony wouldn’t notice, he was in too much pain. Bucky activated his vampiric celerity, rushing them to Tony’s bedroom in two heartbeats, even though it was two floors up and halfway to the east wing of the mansion. He laid the boy down in his bed, and Tony was a boy, just a child, and damn you, Howard, how could you do this?

If Howard wasn’t already dead, Bucky would have killed him again. Killed him a dozen times and never regretted it.

“Let me,” Bucky told Tony, after Tony’s screams had died down into agonized panting. “I can help you, if you let me.”

“You’re not Jarvis,” Tony said.

“No, no I’m not,” Bucky said. “But I want to help you. I can make it stop hurting.”

“What are you going to do?” Tony opened his eyes as wide as he could, those whiskey dark eyes, so expressive and beautiful, even in the midst of his agony.

“I am going to heal you,” Bucky said. He took Tony’s hand in his and pressed his cheek to the palm. It had been so long, so very long since he’d touched Tony, even in the midst of the crises, he couldn’t help but revel in that touch. “There is a cost to it, but you have broken ribs, and--”

“A broken arm, at least, too,” Tony said. He brushed his knuckles down Bucky’s cheek. “I know your face.”

“I see you,” Bucky said the ancient response. Tony probably didn’t even know what the words meant anymore.

“What’s the cost?”

“You have to drink a few sips of my blood,” Bucky told him. “It will change you. A little. But it will also heal you, make you stronger, faster.”

“You’re going to rebuild me, you have the technology?” Tony laughed, an agonized sound that degenerated into wet, tearing coughs. When he could breathe again, he looked expectant. “What other changes? There’s always a downside to a deal with the devil. Not that I think you’re him.”

“No, I’m not Lucifer,” Bucky said, although they’d met before.

“I think you’re a hallucination,” Tony continued. “Brought on by pain and too much whiskey.”

“I’m not that, either,” Bucky said. “I’m a vampire. I was born three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Or thereabouts. I didn’t care much about calendars, back in the day.”

“I bet not,” Tony said, coughing again. “So, you’re going to vampirize me?”

“Not entirely,” Bucky hedged. “You’ll share some of my strengths. None of my weaknesses. You can still go abroad in the daylight, holy symbols won’t hurt you. But you will no longer be quite mortal, and other humans will sense that in you. You’ll have a harder time making friends, because you will be fey and strange to them.” Renfield, Dracula’s familiar, had lost his fucking mind, but Bucky thought Tony was stronger than that.

“Never had many friends t’begin with.”

“It’ll get worse,” Bucky said. “You’ll have trouble sleeping. Your mind will wander. You won’t always remember things.”

Tony snorted. “Sounds like me, already.”

Bucky curled one hand behind Tony’s head, gently. “But it will save your life today.”

“Am I dying?”

“You have a punctured lung and broken bones,” Bucky told him. “Even if I’d called for help the instant I got here, you would be dead before an ambulance ever made it this far. Let me help you.”

Or pass, to the next life, the next cycle, my soulmate, my heart’s desire, my one and only, and I will search and find you again.

And again. And always.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, while Tony tried to make up his mind. “I’d meant to get to you sooner.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your father,” Bucky said. “He’s killed you in a dozen incarnations. I thought… I thought I could get to him first, this time.”

“ _What_?”

Bucky bit at his lip, hard enough to draw blood. He hadn’t meant to say anything. He didn’t answer, either. But Tony saw something; he’d always had that keen perception, every single incarnation of him. Bucky’s clever, clever soulmate. Bucky raised his wrist to his mouth and bit down, canines come out to pierce the flesh. “Drink, Tony,” he told him, holding out his bleeding wrist, the crimson droplets running down his skin.

Bucky knew. He remembered. What is smelled like, to a human. His blood, the gift and curse and joy and pain of it. It was nearly irresistible.

Tony grasped Bucky’s arm, put his mouth over the wounds.

Drank.

“I know your face,” Bucky said, cradling his soulmate to him, feeling the rush of ecstasy in his veins as Tony’s hands were on him, his mouth was on him. Too young, but Bucky still loved him. Tony would always be too young. Bucky was an immortal, chasing a soulmate who died, over and over. Killed, almost always, by his own father before he reached manhood.

Tony pulled back, licked the blood from his lips. “I see you.”

“So you do,” Bucky told him. “And you will again. Later. When you’re ready. When you need me.” Bucky kissed his forehead. “For now, forget… forget.” Beguiling a mortal was easy, and when Bucky moved away, Tony was already sleeping. In the morning, the police would come, tell him that his parents were dead, and he’d remember only getting very drunk, and not anything that happened after that. He could mourn his father without hate in his heart, without the guilt of having wished him dead.

And Bucky would keep watch on him. Until he was needed.

Until Tony was old enough to understand everything that had been done to him.

Until he was ready to be given the choice; agree to mate with a vampire, to bind his soul with someone who could never die. It was a shitty choice. A soulbond was no light matter, and Bucky had been chasing his for thousands of years, determined to get it right. Eventually. It was all he had.

“I see you, Tony Stark,” Bucky said. “And I will see you again.”

***

There was never any telling if it was day or night in the caves. It was cold, and Tony was scared. Sometimes they fed him and sometimes they forgot.

There was the work, there was the plan.

There was fear and pain.

Tony wasn’t even sure how he was still alive, after everything Ten Rings had done to him. The open heart surgery, the waterboarding, the torture. He should be dead, but his body wouldn’t let him and his mind wouldn’t quit and he was going to get out of here.

He was going to kill every single one of these motherfuckers, and he and Yinsen were going to go home.

That was a fact, you could take that to the fucking bank.

He wasn’t even sure how long he’d been here.

“Stark,” Yinsen said, hand on Tony’s shoulder. Tony jerked awake, hissing at the pain in his chest.

“What?”

“Listen,” Yinsen said.

There were screams. Gunfire. More screams.

“Shit, shit, what the fuck is going on, get me into the suit--”

“It’s not ready,” Yinsen protested.

“Do you hear that, it’s fucking ready as we’ve got time to get it,” Tony said, scrambling into the iron armor he’d built. “Button me up, get that boot up program starting, every other one, we’re on the clock here.”

They were out of time, the boot bar was only at 60% and Tony still didn’t have the chest plate firmly attached.

The door exploded inward, crashed into the side of the cave.

The person who strode in didn’t have a gun.

Or armor.

And he was covered in blood.

“Tony,” the man said.

Tony could smell the blood, his mouth watered. He wanted… he wanted to lick it right off the man’s skin.

Tony staggered out of the suit, ignored Yinsen’s hands.

“Stark, that’s… that’s…”

The man crossed in front of the small area where Yinsen had hung a shaving mirror. He cast no reflection. It was as if he were a ghost. Or a hallucination.

Tony reached. “I see you. I know your face, I… you. Oh, God, it’s you.” And then he was in the man’s arms, tucking his face against that utterly familiar throat, smelling him, breathing him in.

“I see you,” the vampire said, and there was a rush of memory. “And I know your face. I told you, I will always come for you. Sorry it took me so long.”

“What is going on here?” Yinsen squeaked.

“Nothing that needs to concern you,” the man said. “I have come for my soulmate. And you are free.”

“I don’t--” Tony touched the man’s face. “I know you, it’s like I’ve always known you. But I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Bucky,” the man said. “Come. Let me take you out of this place, and we will have many words between us.”

“Yinsen, come on. It’s time to see your family again, man,” Tony said, reaching back for his friend.

There was a sharp pain in Yinsen’s eyes, and Tony knew the truth as suddenly as if the man had said it.

“Yes, yes, of course, I will come with you,” Yinsen said.

Well, Stark Industries could always use someone as loyal, intelligent, and clever as Yinsen. Tony would find a way. He couldn’t give the man his family back, but maybe, if he was very lucky, Tony could return some of Yinsen’s kindness. Give him a reason, a purpose. A home.

The three of them walked out of the cave together.

Tony averted his eyes from some of the more gruesomely dismembered bodies. “This is your work?”

Bucky shrugged. “It’s their own folly,” he said, “that they tried to keep me from you.”

“What happened?” Tony asked him. “You’re… uh, late?” It seemed wrong to scold his soulmate for leaving him in a cave with murderers and torturers, but Bucky was a vampire. How could he be… late?

Bucky took off the glove he was wearing, showed off a silvery hand that whirred as he moved it. “That’s a long story, and one you’d be better hearing after you’ve rested,” Bucky said. “But when I felt--” he touched the arc-reactor “-- when I felt this, I knew, I had to do anything to get to you. If I lost you again...”

“How many times?”

Bucky looked at him with all the darkness in his eyes that Tony never wanted to see. “All of them, Tony. I’ve lost you all of the times. But now I have you. Now I see you.”

“And I know your face.”


End file.
